It’s kind of funny how the whole thing started. I had gone to some drum lessons and had an electronic drumkit at home… but hadn’t played that much and didn’t have anyone to play with, so I was worried that I’d lose motivation and drop drumming. So I talked to Chris because he played bass (and he liked Jazz!), we met at my place and had a mini-jam-session. But hey, only bass and drums can have only so much fun. So he proposed we looked for someone else and add some “spice” to the mix.

So I sent a message to some internal company mailing list to see if there was anyone interested. And boy were they interested. Four people replied, and the best is that it was a singer, two guitar players and a piano player. So we decided to look for a place to rehearse, found the amazing Øvingshotellet and gave it a try. One of the guitar players was really put off by Jazz, so ended up being five: voice, guitar, piano, bass and drums.

It was funny because I was exceptionally bad at the time (October 2009; now I’m just very bad), and had never played Jazz before. And of course Jazz is the scariest style to start with, also when you play drums. But somehow we managed to stick together and play for another week, and another, and another, and after some months someone said “we should start looking for a gig, you know? So we have a goal to focus on and all that. Otherwise this will just be fooling around”. We were a bit scared of playing in front of people because we didn’t sound that great (not that we sound that great now, but it was definitely much worse back then). Somewhere in the middle of that we decided to choose “Not a Number” as a band name (the story is longer and more complicated… and boring, so I’ll skip it). I even made a funny logo resembling another band’s logo.

And it happened: we got this opportunity to play in Opera’s 15th anniversary Summer Party last Friday, August 27th, and we went for it. Unfortunately the only recordings we have are of dubious quality, but hey, it’s what we got. And after the next-to-disaster situation we experienced right before the gig, exemplified by the comic below, it’s not such a tragedy that we didn’t end up with a proper recording.The gig was quite short, only 5 songs, but we felt really good while playing and had a lot of fun. Apparently some people liked it even! And we were lucky enough to even have a “guest star” playing sax in the last two songs. The set list was: